Some time ago, I wrote a com­pa­ri­son (in French) of various gra­phi­cal e-mail clients for OS X that I tried. None really satis­fied me. I had noti­ced Gyaz­Mail by Goi­chi Hira­kawa (yes, only one deve­lo­per) from Japan by that time (ver­sion 1.1.8), but the lack of IMAP was (and still is — see Gmail vs. La Poste) a defi­ni­tive no-no for me.

I stop­ped coun­ting how many times I loo­ked for newest Gyaz­Mail ver­sions and hoped it would —finally— sup­port IMAP.

Well, new years, new reso­lu­tions: Gyaz­Mail sup­ports IMAP! I hap­pily down­loa­ded ver­sion 1.5.1 (latest one, relea­sed on january 3^rd — IMAP is present since 1.5, so I guess it is kind of a Christ­mas gift).

Now for the inter­es­ting stuff: what I like, don’t like, chan­ged, expect and so on.

Pros and cons

Pros

• No silly ver­sion num­be­ring (did I say Fire­fox or even Mail.app?)
• Pos­sible to browse pre­fe­rences (pre­vious and next arrows) like my other favou­rite soft­ware, Omniweb
• Twice smal­ler than Mail.app (22,2 Mb ins­tead of 43,3 Mb)! Smal­ler and bet­ter; What are you doing, Apple?
• Return receipt by default (not acti­va­ted by default, but you don’t need a plu­gin). I rarely use return receipt, but still…
• Prio­rity is there too (I think it is in Mail.app too, but since I’m using plu­gins, this is hard to say). I rarely use prio­rity, but still…
• Mail rea­ding is bet­ter than Mail.app: when clo­sing a mail win­dow, you can choose to go to the next one
• It is pos­sible not to replace unbrea­kable space by nor­mal space. I use UTF-8 any­way, so what’s the point of dele­ting it, mmh?
• You can hide the signa­ture by default. It will be there, but won’t dis­tract while you’re wri­ting. May or may not be a good idea. So far, I use this feature.
• Regexp-powered search. I still have to have some use for it, but your mileage may vary.
• Rules are more exten­sive than in Mail.app, but I don’t use much of them. There are fil­ters too, but I don’t see the dif­fe­rence with rules.
• Lot of other fea­tures that I don’t need but you may.
• At last! Like in Eudora, you can Send later! I guess its ori­gi­nal pur­pose is for sen­ding mail when not constantly connec­ted, but I use it as a kind of “tem­po­ri­zer”: Often­time I change my mind just minutes after sen­ding my mail. Draft is not the same fea­ture; I for­got my draft, I can’t for­get my delayed sen­ding. Pro­gram­med sen­ding would be even bet­ter (I was plan­ning to pro­gram a mail to a mail deve­lop­per once this very post would be online, since I already pro­gram my post)

Cons

Sha­re­ware

It is nei­ther gra­tis nor libre. Well, my favou­rite Win­dows brow­ser (Opera) was sha­re­ware (now free­ware) and so is my favou­rite OS X brow­ser (Omni­Web). Bot­tom line: open source is great, qua­lity pro­prie­tary is greater.

Threads mana­ge­ment

Gyaz­Mail does not fea­ture any Mail.app-like “dis­cus­sion mer­ging” (by lack of bet­ter words); It does sup­port in-reply-to, but can’t col­lapse dis­cus­sion, some­thing I like in Gmail as well as in Mail.app (even though their imple­men­ta­tion works poorly since it looks at sub­ject, not in-reply-to). Plus, there is not enough visual evi­dence of such a link (like the com­mon dashed connec­tors — there is only an inden­ta­tion, which is good, but not enough).

Other pro­blem with dis­cus­sions: There is no way to attach a mes­sage to ano­ther dis­cus­sion. I know Mutt is able to do it and this is faily use­ful for grou­ping toge­ther mes­sages that have been bro­ken because of a bad mai­ler, espe­cially when brow­sing in thread-mode and some mes­sages are threa­ded and others are not.

Yeah, I know these are power user requests, but Gyaz­Mail is tar­ge­ted at power users anyway :-)

Space-saving

• Send mes­sage: I’d like the account and signa­ture rol­lo­vers to be on one line. I would also like the Cc:, BCc: and Reply-to: hea­ders to be avai­lable like in Mail.app, ins­tead of having to Browse the View menu if I did not spe­ci­fied them as default (which I did not, since they use a lot of room)
• Mail panel: I’d like mini­mal hea­ders view, like in Thun­der­bird. This is not the same as per­so­na­li­sed headers.

Others

• I pre­fer Mail.app icons (for the tool­bars; for the rest, I have no preference)
• I like Mail.app’s “smart dates” (Today, Yesterday). By the way, French loca­li­sa­tion could use ano­ther one for two days ago (avant-hier)
• pretty slow at IMAP, com­pa­red to Mail.app (10 seconds for dele­ting a mail, so it seems like it had not been dele­ted and you end up pres­sing the key again, with the risk of dele­ting ano­ther mail)
• no format=flowed sup­port for wri­ting. Sup­port for hand­ling is not on par with Mail.app’s, which is much bet­ter (IMNSHO)
• No search field in the tool­bar. I know, cmd+f (search is quite power­ful and even include regexp), but still… I guess it will come with the future Spot­light support
• No bol­ded hea­ders in mail panel, like in Mail.app and count­less others
• Rules seems to be non retroac­tive. I crea­ted a rule saying that every mail whose sen­der is foo should be high­ligh­ted in green, then press Apply a rule. Nothing happened.

Cus­to­mi­sa­tion

Making it look like Mail.app

Des­pite all the limi­ta­tion of Mail.app, it still has a lot of great fea­tures as well as a great appea­rance (yes, I once said the contrary. Chan­ging times). Here’s what I chan­ged to make Gyaz­Mail look more like Mail.app:

As a remin­der: to change colour, I use the Digi­tal Color­Me­ter, look upon Mail’s color, memo­rise the RGB (as 8-bit) and paste them on the rele­vant GyazMail’s dia­log box (colours/cursor/RGB cursors/).

OK, here we go.

Colours

• Mes­sages depth
  1. first level: 39,0,225 for blue
  2. second level: 0,10,413 for green
  3. third level: 90,0,0 for darkred
• Fol­der panel back­ground: 231,237,246

Fonts

• Fol­der and mes­sage list panels: Helvetica → LucideGrande
• Mes­sage panel: nor­mal and mono­space fonts → Monaco 11 (because mono­space is the way to go when it comes to mail and Monaco is anti-aliased star­ting from font size 11).

Some other changes

For the record.

I made the fol­lo­wing changes to all the tool­bars I could find:

• Remove Reply. I always Reply to all (some excep­tions do occur, espe­cially with ille­te­rate mail users) and it saves room
• Swit­ched to small icons (hey, Apple! Mind you make it a gene­ral pre­fe­rence, once and for all for all applications?)

I also moved white from 100% to 98% in the mail panel (the whole appli­ca­tion if way too whit
e out of the box).

Conclu­sion

All in all, Gyaz­Mail is a very inter­es­ting mail client. It com­bines power and elegance—neither Power­Mail, Mul­berry or, on the other extreme, Mail.app may say so. Hell, it may even be bet­ter than The Bat! (my favou­rite e-mail client on Win­dows). Gyaz­Mail is loca­li­zed, Cocoa and defi­ni­tely more power­ful than Apple’s own solu­tion (maybe not as much as what Thun­der­bird with plu­gin could achieve but, again, T-Bird is almost not an Aqua appli­ca­tion and defi­ni­tely not an inte­gra­ted one). Last, but not least, Gyaz­Mail finally sup­ports IMAP! (yes, it is chil­dish to make it that strong but really, if you wai­ted like me for so long, you would too).

Gyaz­mail